3D Video Encoding

Over the past decade the progress in computing and telecommunication technologies have made storage and transmission of visual information media even more ubiquitous. Nowadays it is usual to stream in real-time huge amount of data on-line, e.g. over a LAN or the Internet. The benefits of data compression is worldwide renowned and can be observed in everyday life activity. Hence, it becomes crucial to design an efficient compression scheme for any data model to be transmitted through a network, especially when large bandwidth is required. This chapter presents a method we developed for 3D video encoding that transforms a 3D video stream into a 2D video stream. 3D video data can therefore be easily stored and transmitted by taking advantage of any mature 2D image encoding technology (such as Windows Media, Quicktime, MPEG-4, etc.). Thus, we believe 3D video could become a visual media considered as standard as 2D video in the near future.